This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section. Abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined below, after the main part of the detailed description section.
Recently, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has approved a study item relating to develop the requirements and specification for new radio (NR) systems. See the following document RP-160671, New SID Proposal: Study on New Radio Access Technology, 3GPP TSG RAN Meeting #71, Göteborg, Sweden, 7-10 Mar. 2016). An objective of the study item is to identify and develop technology components needed for NR systems being able to use any spectrum band ranging at least up to 100 GHz. The goal of the study item is to achieve a single technical framework addressing all usage scenarios, requirements and deployment scenarios as defined in 3GPP TR38.913.
One area related to this study item is the physical layer design for physical uplink control channel (PUCCH). The PUCCH, which carries UL control information such as HARQ-ACK and/or CSI via UL channel(s), should support the improvements being made for NR systems. In particular, PUCCH coverage needs to be extended for NR systems.